Sheila Gunn Reid and Tom Harris of the International Climate Science Coalition Canada examine how Conservative Party leadership candidates—including Stephen Harper, Andrew Scheer, and Patrick Brown—flip-flopped on climate policies like Kyoto ($6B in costs) and Paris (Scheer’s $250M green fund despite 68% of base opposing it). Harris warns that incremental concessions, such as carbon taxes or symbolic pipeline rejections (e.g., Keystone XL), risk alienating voters, citing Russia’s alleged funding of anti-pipeline groups to benefit Gazprom. With 66% of People’s Party supporters dismissing climate urgency and Maxime Bernier poised to gain 25%+ of Conservative votes, Reid argues conservatives must reject alarmism entirely—focusing instead on real pollution, Indigenous water access, and homelessness—to avoid losing elections by adopting leftist narratives. [Automatically generated summary]
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Conservative Climate Dilemma00:15:48
Joining me now from his home in Ottawa is good friend of the show, Tom Harris, from the International Climate Science Coalition Canada.
And I knew he would be the exact guy I needed to talk to when it comes to the Conservative Party, the Conservative Party leadership race, and climate policy.
And Tom did some pretty intensive research for the show about the history of conservative politicians and I guess flip-flopping on climate policy.
Tell us what you know, Tom, or at least a little bit.
You know a lot, but on this thing.
Yeah, it really goes back to Bob Mills.
I was the legislative assistant for Bob Mills in 2002, and I learned a lot because, of course, that's when Kyoto was being debated in the House of Commons.
And Bob was originally against the climate scare.
In fact, he did some really excellent work.
He did the filibuster speech, 12 hours of speaking to try to stop Kyoto.
So, I mean, he was very definitely on that side, but he switched.
He changed sides.
And if you look at recent history, you see that happening over and over and over.
I mean, Stephen Harper, and this is something the conservative candidates have to realize, just before he was leader or he was elected leader of the Canadian Alliance, he was against the climate scare.
In fact, you might remember he called Kyoto a money-sucking socialist scheme.
He wasn't wrong.
Yeah.
Tom, we got to put that on a t-shirt.
Exactly.
And yet it wasn't long after he became prime minister that he actually started to support the climate scare, you know, and supporting the Paris Agreement and all that sort of thing.
Now, more recently, we see Andrew Scheer.
And I did a little research before 2017, when the Liberals introduced a bill to or a motion to reaffirm Parliament's support of the Paris Agreement, because you remember that was when Donald Trump announced they were going to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, the United States.
So the Liberals introduced a motion to reaffirm our commitment.
And it's interesting because before the vote, actually 2016, before he was actually elected as leader of the Canadian Conservative Party, Andrew Scheer voted against ratification of the Paris Accord, Paris Agreement.
And he was elected leader then in May 2017.
Less than a month later, on June 2nd, 2017, he voted in support of the Liberals' motion to reaffirm the Paris Agreement.
And Tom, sorry to interrupt you.
And he whipped that vote.
So he didn't even allow dissent on that.
That's right.
If you look at the vote, and I looked it up, it was 277 to 1.
And to her credit, Cheryl Gallant actually voted against it.
But included in the list of people who voted for it, and this is relevant to today's discussion, not only was Andrew Scheer and Aaron O'Toole, of course, but Pierre Polyev.
Pierre Polyev voted in 2017 in support of reaffirmation of our agreement of the Kyoto Protocol.
And, you know, it's interesting because you look back at Andrew Scheer, as I say, he voted against the Paris Agreement.
They thought they were bringing somebody in to lead the party who was going to continue that.
And then he changed only a few weeks after becoming leader.
He actually, let's see here.
He actually had a quarter billion dollar green tech and innovation fund that he wanted to bring in.
And it's interesting because, you know, they were ignoring the grassroots even then, because I looked up the polling at the time.
Angus Reed did a polling at about the same time that Andrew Scheer and the others, except for Cheryl Gallant, voted in support of reaffirming the Paris Agreement.
Angus Reed did a poll and it showed that 68%, 68, more than two-thirds of core CPC supporters felt that the economic growth was more important than the environment.
So even then, they were betraying their base.
You know, they were going against their base.
And it's quite interesting because, you know, then O'Toole came in and he flip-flopped, you know, and that, of course, was a major reason why he lost his position.
So then you fast forward to today.
And what you find is that the current environment critic, his name's Kyle Seeback.
He was on a panel actually on CTV just the other night.
And they were asking him, they asked him very specifically this question.
Does your party support pricing carbon as a way to achieve any reduction in carbon emissions?
Because carbon is not, it's a carbon dioxide.
But that was the question from Evan Solomon.
And unfortunately, Mr. Seeback, he dodged the question completely.
And he did exactly what Patrick Brown did when I went to a town hall a few years ago with Patrick Brown.
Patrick Brown, of course, is running for the Conservative leadership, and he was supporting a climate tax.
He was supporting a carbon tax at that time.
So I went to the town hall and I asked him in front of the audience, I said, do you think that we are causing a dangerous climate crisis?
He wouldn't answer.
He dodged it.
He dodged.
And I asked him again and again and again.
And finally, I said in front of the audience, you're saying you want a carbon tax, but you won't tell me if you think there's a climate emergency, if there's any reason for it.
And so he finally admitted, he said, I don't know.
Now, to his credit, it only took about 10 times asking him before he finally finally admitted it.
And to his credit, he was being honest.
He did not know.
And yet at the same time, he was promoting the climate tax, the carbon tax.
And, you know, now, and of course, as leader of the Conservatives of Ontario, he was actually a supporter of the price on carbon.
Now, to his credit, what he's saying now, he hasn't said a lot about climate change recently, but he's saying that conservatives care about reducing greenhouse gases.
I don't.
Do they really?
Do they really?
They don't.
But to his credit, he actually said that he would conduct a party-wide investigation and discussion to find out what conservatives really thought.
Well, all he has to do is look to the last election to find out what they thought.
Because if you look at the most recent polls that I dug up and I sent to you, it's interesting because it shows that while there's a lot of conservatives in the Conservative Party of Canada, grassroots, who oppose the climate scare, who don't want to see it, there's quite a few who actually support it.
But among the People's Party of Canada, there's a huge number of people who obviously one of the reasons they moved over from Conservatives to the People's Party is because they oppose the climate scare.
So if they have any chance of getting those people back, they're going to have to start saying what Maxine Bernier is saying, namely the climate scare is, well, he doesn't use the same words as Stephen Harper, but a money-sucking socialist scheme would be actually pretty appropriate.
And when we look at the list of conservative candidates, it's really sad because I went to Pierre Pollier's presentation, his axe the tax, which was kind of like a World Wrestling Federation event, you know, like they had rock music.
And, you know, when he came into the auditorium, he had a troop of people behind him and he was smacking hands and he was all excited and cheering and everything.
I thought it was completely corny, but the, I guess the faithful liked it.
There's a good 500 people there.
But when it came to the climate issue, he said, we want to axe the tax.
A prime minister with Pierre Polyev would have no carbon tax.
We're going to have, then he talked about technology for reducing carbon emissions, carbon dioxide emissions.
He talked about, he supported the carbon capture and sequestration.
He wanted to get, yeah, which is just going to add a huge expense and have no impact on climate.
And probably with Canada being such a small emitter, it won't have any impact on greenhouse gases.
Please capture my carbon, by the way.
Yeah.
But he went further and he said, oh, and for those of you who, you know, he said, we all like those electric vehicles and we're going to mine lithium in Canada.
And then he went further and said, and we're going to get developing countries to get off their coal to reduce emissions to take clean Canadian natural gas.
And of course, he supports reducing emissions.
So it's very sad.
He's doing the same thing.
Shire is even worse.
I mean, Shere is like wacko.
When Canada withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol, you'd laugh to hear that then Premier Shire said, Well, if Canada's out of the protocol, Quebec is going to stay in it anyway.
You know, so Shire hasn't released his environment platform.
It's coming out in May.
But if you look at his actual experience, his actual record, he had cap and trade for Quebec.
He was always promoting the climate scare.
Leslie Lewis, look at her.
Leslie Lewis hasn't said much about climate change recently either.
But as recently as 2019, she finished a PhD promoting the Paris Agreement.
So it's pretty obvious where she's going to come out when she finally does release things.
So you've got Pierre Polyev supporting the climate scare indirectly, but talking about carbon sequestration and reducing emissions and all that stuff.
You got Sharais, obviously, he's going to support it.
Same thing with Leslie-Lewis, same thing with Brown.
The only one among the top five who is not yet supporting the climate scare is Roman Babar.
And I actually went to Babur.
I actually went to his event and I asked him, you know, I said, well, you know, conservatives want a leader who's going to stand up to the climate scare.
Would you stand up to it?
Would you prevent a climate lockdown?
And again, he kind of dodged the question.
He said, well, under a, you know, Prime Minister Babur administration, there would be no lockdowns.
And he talked about lockdowns being a bad thing and all that.
But he didn't actually say whether he supported the scare or not.
And to his credit, he didn't talk about using technology instead of tax, which of course was Andrew Scheer's best line.
He didn't talk about that.
But you know, I think that conservatives are not recognizing the fact that they can actually oppose the climate scare and do it in a very thorough way without appearing as climate deniers.
All they have to do is talk about the fact that climate change is natural.
It's happened all the time, you know, and human contribution, according to many scientists, they don't have to say it themselves because, like Andrew, or I should say Patrick Brown said, they don't know.
They're not scientists themselves.
So they should simply acknowledge that there are many scientists, Ian Clark at the University of Ottawa, Tim Patterson at Carleton University, Madhav Kandekar, former Environment Canada scientist.
You know, many, many experts in the field say that the climate scare is hugely exaggerated.
So while they will protect the air, land, and water, they're not going to go along with the climate scare.
And they could do that.
Now, what I'm hearing, Sheila, you know, over the years is that they say, well, the public support the climate scare.
It depends on what public you're talking about.
Obviously, the People's Party that they're trying to get back to the Conservative Party don't support it.
But what they don't realize is that what drives public opinion more than anything is the statements of leaders.
And, you know, they actually looked into the United States, for example, and they found that when conservatives, in other words, the Republicans and Democrats agreed on climate change, such as when John McCain was agreeing with the climate scare, the percent of the population that wanted extreme action on climate change was much higher.
When they actually had a division between the Republicans and the Democrats, support for the climate scare went way down.
So it's a strategic mistake to think that you must follow public opinion.
The truth is, the leaders of these parties, to a large extent, influence and direct public opinion.
So my point is that, as I said to Roman Babar, we really need a conservative leader who will appeal to the grassroots.
Instead of doing what Andrew Scheer did, instead of doing what Bob Mills did, instead of doing what Aaron O'Toole did, like learn a lesson.
The grassroots don't like it.
So stop doing it.
You know, it's interesting because carbon pricing doesn't actually reduce carbon dioxide.
It reduces your family's disposable income.
That's really what it does.
But looking at this poll that you sent me, and it's a political poll, 66% of People's Party supporters either are not too concerned or not concerned at all.
Actually, not concerned at all is the greater one.
They're not concerned at all about climate change.
The number is about 38%, 40%-ish of conservatives.
Block Quebecois, they are pretty close to the conservatives on this issue.
But when you look at the liberals, they're about 10%.
The NDP, they're about 9%, wherein they are not concerned, don't care about climate change.
Appealing to those people, that's the way you win the next election.
That's how you steal those votes from Justin Trudeau, from Jogmeet Singh, is you say to those people, we don't care how you live your life.
We want to keep more of your money in your pocket.
Everybody cares about inflation.
That's a cross-partisan issue at this point.
And we also are not worried about climate change.
We don't think it's something that you need to lose your head over.
You can bleed.
Well, according to this data, 9% right off the liberals, right off the top, that's enough to win an election.
Yeah, exactly.
And, you know, even the question wasn't well worded.
I mean, it's not like, are you concerned about climate change?
The real question they should have asked is: do you think we are causing a climate emergency that's so serious, we need to restructure at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars our entire energy infrastructure?
And I'll bet you anything that at least two-thirds of conservatives would say, well, no.
I mean, you know, and so I think that the question is a leading question.
People can be concerned about climate change because if it gets colder in Canada, for example, that's the most serious threat.
I mean, there's 10 times as many people around the world killed due to cold than due to warming.
So if somebody asked me, are you concerned about climate change?
I'd say, yeah, because I don't want to see global cooling, which Dr. Tim Ball and quite a few experts are saying are coming, is coming.
But I don't think we're causing a climate crisis.
Come on.
And so if the poll was done properly, I'll bet you'd find that the majority of conservatives did not want hundreds of billions of dollars spent on this sort of theory, which isn't working, by the way, because of course, you know, it's supposed to be much warmer today than it has been, you know, in previous years, according to the computer models.
Strategic Mistakes In Climate Transition00:04:09
And yet they're using those models to forecast the future.
And, you know, of course, they want to get off natural gas too.
This is the other thing that people don't realize.
It sort of reminds me of that pastor in Nazi Germany who said, you know, first they came for the Jews, but I wasn't Jew, so I didn't speak out, et cetera.
Well, you know, the natural gas people at one point were promoting the end of coal because they saw a great opportunity.
But of course, now what's happening is now that coal is being phased out, now the environments want to get rid of natural gas.
And we're seeing that all down the line.
So there's strategic mistakes being made by the political class, by the industries.
I mean, the industries to a large extent are the greatest supporters of the climate scare.
You know, you'd laugh, Sheila.
The person in the world who I've heard that is the most outspoken in support of the climate scare is not Al Gore, not David Suzuki.
It is the previous head, Rich, his name is, of the World Nuclear Association.
Yeah, I bet.
Out of the UK, they've said statements that are just incredible.
I mean, they say, not millions, but billions of people on all continents will be damaged and die and be affected by this terrible thing.
So by our nuclear reactors.
But what they don't realize again is that they are helping the enemy because the environmentalists hate nuclear power even more than they hate fossil fuels.
So once again, you have these strategic mistakes being made.
And we've written to the World Nuclear Association and say, look, you know, this is just going to lessen the credibility of your organization and the whole nuclear industry when the climate scare finally collapses.
And it will, it will eventually collapse.
I mean, if you look at Ottawa, I have people in British Columbia, friends in British Columbia, who say they hope the city of Ottawa goes ahead with its $60 billion climate plan, because then thousands of Ottawans will die at minus 30 and they won't do it here.
So, I mean, I hope as an Ottawa, I hope they don't do it.
Me too.
Yeah.
You know, Jay Lair, who's our really our chief scientist, wonderful fellow, 85 years old, an ex-um Ironman triathlon guy.
He still swims for miles and bikes.
Oh, today I was lazy.
I only biked 30 miles.
You know, he's an incredible guy.
But I mean, he thinks that we're going to have to have what happened in Texas in February of last year happen all over the Western world before people are going to wake up.
And just to refresh people's memory, in Texas, what happened is a little before that deep freeze hit Texas, and it wasn't a record, it was cold, but it wasn't a record.
It was like minus six, that sort of thing.
Cold for Texas for sure.
And what happened is that a little before that, Texas was getting 58% of its electricity from wind power, and the wind died.
And so suddenly natural gas had to compensate not only for the extreme cold, but it had to compensate for 58% of all the electricity that was previously supplied by wind.
And of course, what was the result?
The result was they had massive blackouts.
They came within minutes of the entire system collapsing.
And the Wall Street Journal reported later that not only were tens of billions of dollars lost, but 700 people died.
700 due to hypoxia, due to in their car because of keeping their car running all night.
They were freezing to death in their house.
And one boy, for example, froze to death in his sleep.
And sadly, Jay Lear thinks that this is the kind of thing that will have to happen over and over and over and over before the bulk of the population wake up.
And I think that this is the kind of message that Pierre Polyev and that, you know, Patrick Brown and Lesson Lewis, all of them should be saying, hey, look what happens when you really do make a transition to renewable energy.
Grid Failures and Murders00:06:25
And just to give you a cost figure here, it was kind of amazing.
Stephen Gabot was on CTV with, again, with Evan Solomon, my favorite.
And on April 3rd, Stephen Guibot, the Environment and Climate Change Minister, he said that since 2015, the feds have spent something around $110 billion on the energy transition.
Now, 110 billion on a transition to craziness, you know, and yet, and yet we still have the conservatives essentially defending this transition.
And, you know, to me, Sheila, there's an analogy I'd like to use.
It's like you've been falsely accused of murder.
And just before the trial, your judge comes to your lawyer comes to you and he says, you know, I think you'd get a lesser sentence if you pleaded guilty.
but asked for the mercy of the court.
I think you fired your lawyer.
And that's exactly what many conservative supporters are doing.
They're firing the Conservative Party of Canada because they are admitting that we are committing this murder, that we are ruining the planet with our carbon dioxide.
And so what are they doing?
They're firing the Conservative Party and they're moving to Maxime Bernier and the People's Party.
And as you and I discussed in a previous interview, had they got the People's Party votes, they would now be government.
And that's something that they just aren't learning.
I mean, why on earth is Pierre Polyev supporting the climate scare, just as he did in 2017 when he voted in support to reaffirm the Paris Agreement?
You know, why is Patrick Brown still doing it?
Even though he admits that, well, I don't really know.
And Leslie Lewis, I imagine she'll do it.
Shere will do it.
I'm hopeful that Roman Babar will actually say what's real.
And, you know, they don't have to come across as anti-environmental.
They simply have to say, let's protect the things that are real, air, landing, water pollution, species at risk, that kind of thing.
Yeah, I'm pro-tree, anti-tax.
And it's funny that, you know, you mentioned that I think it was an Andrew Scheer quote, technology instead of taxation.
That's exactly what unfolded in Texas, where they incentivized green technology through tax structure, giving these subsidies and tax breaks for you to put up wind turbines that are unreliable.
And then they had an overrepresentation of that on the grid.
And it cost people their lives when you needed the grid.
It's, you know, you need the grid in times of catastrophe.
It's the same thing as you need your civil liberties in times of tyranny.
Same thing with green energy.
You need green energy when, or you need reliable energy when things go bad.
And it wasn't there.
And people died.
That's right.
They died.
And, you know, the sad thing is they say, oh, the natural gas failed.
Well, two reasons.
One is because the demand on natural gas was sudden and extreme.
But the other thing, Sheila, and this will make your viewers really laugh sadly, ironically, in an effort to please the green movement, they justified having a lot of gas, natural gas, by saying that they would run the pumps and the other valves and the other things that were used to control the natural gas pipelines.
They would run it with renewable energy with wind power.
Yay, we're going to run it.
So what happened when the wind died is they couldn't actually use all their natural gas lines because they were running them with wind power.
I mean, talk about insane.
You've got a natural gas pipeline full of the fuel.
Why don't you use that fuel to run the pipeline?
But instead, they use wind.
So, I mean, it's completely crazy.
And the conservatives simply are not leading.
You know, I think that for someone like Roman Babar, who's admittedly, you know, a bit of a, you know, his chances of winning are not that strong.
But imagine if he seeing a completely wide open lane for leading the party to actually question the climate scare and to show that a lot of it doesn't make sense.
I mean, imagine if he were to say, I would kill not only the carbon tax, I would kill the whole climate scare.
It's not technology to solve this problem because the problem doesn't exist.
Right.
You know, I would love to see him say that.
And he could pull in support from all across the party.
I haven't seen any recent polls as to how many of the parties support economy over environment.
But back, you know, in 2017, when Andrew Scheer was trying to solve the climate crisis, more than two-thirds of the grassroots opposed it.
So, you know, I know he lost his position for other reasons as well.
You know, there was a controversy about his child's education and where they were getting the money.
But at the same time, I'm sure that must have played a big role.
And of course, in the case of O'Toole, his sabotaging the base, that played a huge role in him losing his leadership position.
So why are these candidates?
Oh, you'd laugh.
Here's, you'll think this is a joke.
Who would you say, aside from Aaron O'Toole, would be the worst person for Pierre Polyev to bring in to introduce him to the big rally on Thursday night?
Was it Doug Ford?
No, it was Andrew Scheer.
No.
So here we have a guy who failed, who betrayed the base, who's now introducing a candidate who's supposedly appealing to the base.
So, I mean, I'm like, oh man, what is he doing?
He's showing that he's going to be a carbon copy to some extent of Andrew Scheer.
And they already got rid of Andrew.
What are they doing?
God, it's so dumb.
These conservatives just love to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory at every opportunity, don't they?
Now, I wanted to ask you about another thing that's in the news.
And people keep telling me that maybe I talk about this too much, but Keystone XL and Russian oil and gas.
Keystone XL would absolutely offset Russian oil and gas imports and then some.
Keystone XL: The Climate Funding Dilemma00:12:54
And it's interesting to note because you mentioned the nuclear energy movement, the nuclear energy lobby, which I like nuclear.
I like it.
It's just that they don't need to buy into the climate scare to sell their good ideas.
They don't need to concede that ground.
But there was some research done that showed that Russia was funding through the back door, through offshore accounts, the green energy and green, you know, the climate scare people, the big foundations, the environmentalist foundations in San Francisco, they were funding that through offshore accounts to whip up opposition to American and Canadian pipelines and fracking.
Why?
Not because Putin cares about green energy, but because it protected Gazprom's market share, which at the end of the day is funding Putin's war on Ukraine.
And it's funny to see the same people who say, I care about climate change with also a Ukrainian flag in their Twitter bios.
And they can't realize that one is harming the other.
They just can't put that connection together.
Yeah.
In fact, it's interesting.
I love Rex Murphy.
I think he does writing.
He's now writing for the Epoch Times, which is wonderful, actually.
And I've subscribed to them.
They're great.
But he wrote an article just a couple of weeks ago saying that the green movement have a lot to account for with their support of effectively supporting tyrants around the world.
Because, you know, you look at Biden, in place of the Keystone XL pipeline, you know, very clean energy coming from Canada in the most efficient and environmentally friendly way.
He's now negotiating with Venezuela.
He's negotiating more with the Saudis, with the Saudis, with Iran.
Okay, so I mean, it's pretty ridiculous.
I think that what's happening here, Sheila, is the environmental movement can kill Canadian and American oil.
They can succeed.
They can't kill Russian oil.
They can't kill Iranian oil.
Imagine if you're in Iran and you're going out protesting against Iranian oil.
I don't think you'd last for very long.
I mean, you'd be in a gulag if you weren't dead.
So I think that what the environment movement does is they say, well, we can kill Canadian oil.
And of course, in the case of the Keystone, they had pressure on both sides of the border and they identified it as a symbol of the climate movement.
In fact, the Stephen Steve even admitted that Keystone by itself wouldn't have any effect on climate, would almost no effect on emissions, but that it was a symbol of the climate catastrophe coming.
And if the Biden administration wasn't serious about that, then they're not serious about climate change.
And it is interesting in both Obama and Biden's canceling of the pipeline, the main issue they named was that the United States had to appear to be leading the world to set an example to the world on the fight against climate change.
And Keystone was the way to do it.
So, you know, but Allison Redford, when she went to Washington, D.C. campaigning for the pipeline, she promoted the climate scare over and over and over.
And Jason Kenney indirectly promotes the climate scare.
They actually say the right things about the economic impact and the fact that it's less greenhouse gases, etc.
But if the pipeline is not about the actual climate impact or the actual greenhouse gases, but it's a symbol, then you have to fight the symbol.
If you let them get away with the symbol being we're saving the planet for future children and the pipeline is our first target, because of course the environments don't want to just kill Keystone.
They want to kill every pipeline.
They want to stop all shipments, et cetera.
And they're working against trains right now, for example.
So, I mean, you don't defeat a symbol by not fighting the symbol.
And, you know, it's the same thing in the conservative leadership campaign.
It really is, like I said in my Real Clear Energy article, death by a thousand cuts.
And it's going to continue to kill, kill, kill industries, jobs, massive tax benefits that we would otherwise have.
It's going to continue to kill all these things until we kill the climate scare.
And as long as conservatives are not prepared to really attack the symbol, then they're going to lose.
You know, it's interesting.
I sent Pierre Polyev's comments to a PhD in physics friend of mine who's a strong conservative.
And I said, what do you think of this?
He said, vote, People's Party.
Like that was all he said in his answer.
Because what's happening is they will lose and lose and lose more and more people who understand, like this PhD in physics, that the climate scare is wrong because they're not prepared to fight the symbol.
And Keystone was a casualty of the conservative approach.
And it's very sad because, you know, there's a saying in the book, and I really encourage readers or viewers to look up this book on Amazon or wherever you want to look it.
It's called Rules for Radical Conservatives.
And it's the author, it's a pen name, but the author is David Cahane, K-A-H-A-N, I believe.
And he writes the book as if he were a left-winger telling conservatives how they beat us, how they marched through the institutions, how they took over our schools.
It's like the screw tape letters, but for conservatives.
Right.
So he's telling us, you dumb conservatives, here's how we beat you.
Okay.
And he has a statement in there, which is a beautiful quote.
I can't remember the exact wording, but he says a good general never fights a battle on his enemy's terrain or using his enemy's methods or under the enemy's terms, because of course they'll lose.
And that's exactly what the conservatives do.
They accept the symbol, the terrible climate catastrophe that's coming.
I mean, Ed Fast, for example, who was the environment critic under Rona Ambrose and Andrew Scheer, he said that his colleagues unreservedly supported the Paris Agreement, but objected to the liberals' approach as to how they were going to fill it.
So the Conservatives are doing this over and over and over, and they just miss it.
They're losing people and they're going to, I wouldn't be surprised if Maxime Bernier gets 25% or more of the Conservative vote if the next leader of the Conservative Party still supports the climate scare.
Because people like my friend, my PhD friend, they say, well, why would I vote for a party that supports this nonsense that's ruining a country, destroying jobs, and costing us a fortune?
So I guess don't get it.
They say that Pierre Polyev is going to be the next prime minister.
Well, why do we elect someone like that?
We elect them because we want to change what's going on in Canada.
And he is certainly talking about change in a lot of areas, and that's really great.
But for people who care about the climate scare, people who work in the energy industry and others knowing how important energy is to us, there wouldn't be any change.
In fact, with a previous Conservative plan, which was going to be regulations instead of carbon tax, various differences.
Yeah.
Well, various economists showed that that would be more expensive.
You know, so sure, we can replace Justin Trudeau with a conservative leader, but if they're still supporting the climate scare, like, what's the point?
Yeah.
You know, and it's interesting because an unhealthy economy, a bad economy, usually, if you care about those sorts of things, and I don't, and I'm pretty sure you don't, emissions go up.
Things get dirtier and filthier.
You look at third world cities compared to first world cities.
And so when you look at, you know, economic strife, it's dirty.
You want a prosperous economy.
It makes for a cleaner environment.
And Trump, he let fracking just happen pretty much everywhere.
And what happened in the United States?
Again, if you care about those sorts of things, emissions went down.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
And, you know, it's interesting because for people who really care about the environment, they should be very concerned about the climate scare because the climate activists have hijacked the environmental movement.
I mean, we've got Earth Day coming up on the 22nd of April.
Do we?
Darn it.
What are we going to do, Tom?
I'm dressing a tree.
But, you know, Earth Day, when it started in 1970, was about real environmental concerns.
Except for the founder composted his girlfriend.
We cannot forget that.
That's true.
That's not a great, a great thing.
He did.
But the environmental movement really has to kick the climate people off the stage because they have hijacked a friend who works in water on the other side of the river in Quebec.
And he said that as the climate scare funding goes up, the funding for water resources, you know, water pollution and things like that abatement has gone down because there's only a limited amount of money the government's going to pour into environment.
I mean, it's important to focus on real issues because if climate change absorbs the massive, the biggest amount of environmental funding, then you don't have funding to clean up the Ottawa River, which is filthy, by the way, and it flows right by the parliament building.
So they can't clean that up, but they're going to, you know, they're going to stop climate change in the year 2500.
It's pretty silly.
So, what the Conservatives need to do is to pick examples like that.
Indians on or Native people on reserves, they don't have fresh drinking water.
We have to focus on the water resources issue and really solve it.
I mean, it's a real disgrace that in Canada, our Native people in many reserves don't have proper drinking water.
And imagine what you could do.
Like, as I say, $110 billion is what Guibot cited on CTV News as to what the feds have spent on the so-called energy transition, energy transition to suicide.
You know, like imagine if even a tiny fraction of that went to help the Native communities or went to clean up the Ottawa River.
I mean, we could have a much more superior economy, environment, everything if they would simply get off this stupid climate change thing.
And, you know, the big threat, of course, and we should adapt to climate change, is cooling.
Because you might remember Tim Ball, Dr. Ball, who was our lead scientist, he also frequently talked about the fact that the sun is going into a grand solar minimum by around 2060.
And that's when we could see conditions as cold as it was a few centuries ago when the Thames River in London froze three, yeah, three meters.
Was it three?
It was a meter thick.
That's right.
It was a meter thick, three feet thick.
Now, of course, it never freezes.
They even had oxen in frost fairs on the Thames River.
And Tim, of course, he was a, he is, he's still around.
He's a historical climatologist.
And he shows how throughout those cold periods of the little ice age, we had crop failure, we had extreme weather, we had the really bad things that they're saying now will happen with warming, but they got it upside down.
It's cooling that causes these problems, not warming.
So, yes, we should adapt to climate change, and that should be the focus.
We should continue to work on alternative energy, but to try to replace like with all EVs, you know, they want to have what is it, 100% of new sales by 2035?
2035.
By 2050, yeah, they want to have 20% by 2026.
That's going to be a challenge, 60% by 2030, and 100% by 2050 electric vehicles.
So, what does Pierre say?
He says, we're going to mine lithium in Canada so you can get those great electric vehicles.
No, Pierre, we don't want electric vehicles that don't work properly in the winter, that involve in the supply chain, you know, all sorts of human rights and environmental abuses, which he is focused on, which is a good thing.
But who in their right mind wants an electric snowplow?
You know, I mean, you want a big, powerful truck to push right through that snow.
So, what with the combination of going to weak energy sources, the potential for coming cooling, we're setting up a potential real disaster for Canada's children, quite frankly.
Indigenous Employment in Mining00:06:24
You know, I'm glad you brought up the topic of clean water on Indigenous reserves because it does tie back into this blocking of Canadian resource development.
Because in Alberta, if I had to pick one single industry that I would describe as Indigenous, I would say it's the oil patch.
People from Indigenous communities are employed in mining and oil and gas.
They're in trucking related to mining and oil and gas.
The work sites are in Indigenous communities or close by Indigenous communities.
So, this allows Indigenous youth to stay in their own community, but also get out of generational poverty.
And when you take those jobs away, you damn entire communities to never having a way to get out.
And if you look at prosperous reserves where there is industry and jobs around them, the reserves are clean and happy, just like a normal community.
But when it's depressed through economic strife, lack of jobs, it looks like Attawapiscap.
Yeah.
And so if you care about Canada's Indigenous communities, if you want them to have clean drinking water, get out of the way of fossil fuel development.
Those are the jobs that are closest to Indigenous communities.
Yes, exactly.
And there's another sector in the population that are being ignored, and that is the homeless.
You know, it's interesting.
I have a friend who works in death and dying, and she looks at all the statistics during the pandemic, and she shows a huge increase in suicides among young people.
But she's also seeing a big increase in, like in Ottawa, for example, we're seeing homeless people dying in the cold and they find them frozen to death with a bottle of booze beside them.
And yet the city of Ottawa can't afford enough support for those people, but they can afford $60 billion for climate change.
Sickening.
You know, like we really have our priorities upside down.
You know, when I was working in the House of Commons, one thing I noticed is the groups that the parliamentarians take most seriously are those who apply the most pressure, people who get out and protest.
And I guess there aren't people out protesting for homeless.
You know, it's the same thing with our nursing homes.
Our nursing homes, both my parents lived in them for a short while before they passed away.
Our nursing homes are massively underfunded.
So these are real concerns.
And they're actually not right-wing concerns.
They're just sensible concerns.
And a conservative leader could say, no, we're not going to spend it on this fictitious idea that we control the climate in a century.
We're going to work on native reserves.
We're going to work on getting them jobs and keeping their jobs, like in the fossil fuel sector.
We're going to work on homeless problem.
We're going to work on, you know, all these other real issues that require money and require help and support.
And I would think that would come across as a much more compassionate government than this constant focus on climate, climate, climate.
Yeah, it's, I think it's great hubris to think that we can change the weather before we could help the homeless person in front of us.
Tom, I could talk to you all day, but you're busy and I'm busy.
Tom, tell us how people find the work that you do, including your podcast.
Do not forget to plug your podcast and how they can support the work that you do, because you guys are a mom and pop shop over there and you don't take any of, you know, Russian money through offshore accounts or government money.
You're really, you're up against the green movement with their Russian funds and you don't have any of that.
Yeah, that's right.
Well, people can go to our website, icsc-canada.com.
And in the upper right-hand corner, you put your email address in and click, keep me up to date, and we will.
We're just about to send to the city of Ottawa, for example, an opposition to them signing the fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty, which of course is a new treaty that is just being pushed on the city, Vancouver.
They're treating it like nuclear weapons.
Well, exactly.
They're saying it is the nuclear weapons in the 21st century and we have to stop it.
We're actually pushing them against not only their ridiculous green plan, but also they want to not have a replacement to a major natural gas pipeline in Ottawa because we're not going to need any natural gas, they say.
I mean, this makes no sense at all.
You know, we're going to power the city with renewable energy.
So we're opposing that.
And, you know, our report is there right on the homepage, icsc-canada.com, which is a cautionary tale to governments around the world.
What happens if you let the environmental movement take over, the climate change movement in particular, take over?
They will drive you to absolute destruction.
I mean, they really will.
And we're going to see Texases all over Canada, all over the world, you know, the 700 dead due to wind power, et cetera.
And the podcast, if you go up resources on the homepage, you need to scroll down, you can find the podcast where I actually interviewed you as well.
So, yeah, and we also very much welcome donations because, you know, we're working hard to try to convince the politicians, especially on the conservative side, that there are huge gains to be made if you become a climate realist, if you actually represent the grassroots the way they want to be represented.
So we're fighting that very, very hard in Canada.
You're one of the few people who is openly doing that and saying what normal conservatives think out loud.
I think normal conservatives, they tell this to pollsters sometimes, not all the times.
But I think generally people don't care about climate change.
They know the TV tells them they're supposed to care about climate change, but they don't actually care.
They go outside, they look at the weather.
Do I need to put a coat on?
Do I need to wear rain boots?
That's insofar as how much they care about the weather.
At least that's how I think.
That's right.
They care more about the future of the country and their job and their children and the poor people and the native people.
They care about that, not about this crazy idea that we are the master controls of the climate.
Dr. Tam's Dilemma00:04:30
Tom, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show today and for your incredible research and work into these topics.
Like I said, you are really one of just a handful of people talking about these issues, but they are issues that affect every single Canadian.
And climate policy makes you poorer and takes your job away.
And I think we should all care about that.
That's for sure.
Thank you, Sheila.
Thanks, Tom.
Well, this is the second week where we're testing out a new letters portion of the show.
Unlike the CBC, we want to hear from you.
So instead of just my usual sign-off where I give my final thoughts, I want to hear your thoughts.
Our first letter is from Catalan Radilescu.
That sounds like a Romanian last name.
I'm sure you have a lot to say about communism.
Catalyn, let's read through some of this together.
Hello, Sheila.
Big fan of your work.
Well, that's nice.
Thank you for all your efforts to offer a different perspective than what the media party, to use a term from the old communist countries, parrots.
And thanks to the entire Rebel News team for their fight against propaganda and tyranny.
That said, I keep thinking of how we could do a better job to push back against the system.
Mr. Peckford, having sued the federal government for their unscientific air travel ban for the unvaccinated, is one of not too many examples so far.
It may be difficult to broadly push against the government.
A better strategy may be picking them one by one.
Dr. Tam is a very good first target.
In the United States, medical errors and malpractice are among the top 10 leading causes of death.
It's estimated that over 250,000 people die annually because of medical errors, incompetence, and fraud.
Every year, there are tens of thousands of malpractice cases.
I am using United States numbers because they are more transparent with their data and more stats are available than in Canada.
I know that some good doctors wrote warning letters to the government and tried to get the medical robots of the government to participate in a dialogue for identifying the best solutions for the country.
They have been totally ignored so far, and some even lost their licenses and jobs.
That tells me that those vaccines have nothing to do with the health of the population.
Dr. Tam is giving the government some sort of appearance that science is behind all their policies.
If Dr. Tam has proven that she is wrong, then perhaps the confused folks may wake up from their sleepwalking and realize that they have been misled.
Like that enlightening moment when the kid yells at the emperor is actually naked, and then suddenly the crowd starts to see that.
We really need to make all the possible efforts to fight against this.
I was born in a communist country.
I spent the first half of my life living the communist nightmare and the second half experiencing the liberty and human dignity in Canada.
What I see now happening in our country, it very deeply concerns me.
It is like a nightmare coming back.
Some things are even worse than what I experienced in my early life.
I could give you some revealing stories from the Communist Times if you'd ever think that may be of interest for your listeners.
If people of Canada knew how good of a life they're still having, they would wake up and fight for what the generations before them fought for and even gave their lives for to ensure a good future for their children and grandchildren.
Thank you again, Sheila.
Good luck with your work and all the best.
Catalyn Rudolescu.
I'm guessing you're from Romania.
I should tell you that this past week, at least for the first three days of the week, I have been live tweeting court because two churches and some private individuals are suing the Alberta government for a violation of their charter rights through lockdowns.
And our chief medical officer of health, Dina Hinshaw, has been on the stand.
And it has been really something to listen to her justify literally destroying lives at Rebel News.
We have been in the pressure cooker of telling these stories for the past two years.
I've listened to Dina Hinshaw justify it by saying that they were trying to protect the health care system so that other people could use it if they needed it.
The healthcare system does not have rights.
Government's Role in Protecting Rights00:00:49
People do.
And it is the government's job to protect those rights, not take them away, especially in times of tyranny.
That's when the government restraining itself from stomping on your civil liberties matters the most.
Well, everybody, that's the show for tonight.
What a great letter.
Thank you so much for tuning in.
If you'd like to have your letter read on the show, I sort of picked them at random.
I'm not, you know, screening them for quality.
Send me an email at Sheila at RebelNews.com.
Put gun show letters in the subject line.
It'll land in my email box and I'll just pick it.
It could be you next week on the show.
Thanks so much for tuning in.
Thank you to everybody in Studio in Toronto for putting the show together.
I'll see everybody back here at the same time in the same place next week.